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Thursday, July 24, 2014

It is kind of late to blog about this post but better than never! This is my 2nd Live YouTube soaping event a month ago inspired by the Honey Moon event. Honey Moon gets its name by the golden yellow color of the moon and it was the biggest moon because it was closest to the horizon. It is also sometimes called Strawberry Moon because it always happens during peak of strawberry harvest season which is the month of June. If you are interested in how it's made please watch the video below.

In the video I explained the inspiration and how the soap is done, please watch it if you have questions about the whole process and or tools I used. And these are the cut photos:

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Have you heard of Beldi soap? It's also called Moroccan Black Soap, made of 100% olive oil and black olive paste. It is used in Moroccan bath or Hamam Maghrabi. It starts with an overall rinse, then smear black soap all over your body, followed by sitting in a hot steamy room for awhile until your pores all open up. Then someone will take a scrubby sponge and scrub the heck out of you, LOL It is then followed by a body mask to detox. The whole process takes about an hour. Your skin is supposedly like baby soft again.

Anyway, I tried making Beldi soap the other day, except I used herbal infused olive oil and fresh rosemary puree instead of black olive paste. Beldi soap uses potassium hydroxide to saponify oils, same process as making liquid soap. The only difference is it stays as a paste and not diluted with more liquid to form final liquid soap.

I used glycerin method to avoid cooking. It's very fast, done within 10 minutes. Glycerin method is by using glycerin in place of water to dissolve potassium hydroxide. This method requires no cooking, no additional external heating required.

Usually after I saponified my liquid soap using glycerin method I would let it cool down on the counter. By the time it's cool enough to touch it's pretty much thicken to a sticky paste consistency. I store the paste until I need soap then I'll dilute is with hot distilled water. But when I did the same to my Beldi soap it didn't get thick like my normal liquid soap. Over night it actually stayed jelly like but got really shinny!

I'm thinking it has a lot to do with the puree rosemary I added that made the soap more like jelly than sticky paste. Jelly is definitely easier to apply on skin than sticky paste, I'm not complaining!

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About Me

I love anything creative!
They say left brain controls logic and right brain goes for creativity, I guess I'm more of a right brain gal! My full time job is consuming most of my time exercising my left brain. This is just an outlet for my restless right brain to vent.